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Abstract

The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean1,2, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus3 and Iran4,5. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia6,7,8, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe1,6,9 or Armenia4,9. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.

Acknowledgements

We thank M. McCormick for comments and critiques, F. Göhringer, I. Kucukkalipci, and G. Brandt for wet laboratory support, and S. Pääbo for providing access to the clean room facilities at the MPI-EVA, Leipzig. We thank the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Hellenic Archaeological Service, and the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism for approval of our studies, and the personnel of the Hagios Nikolaos, Herakleion, Pireas, Olympia, Chora (Trifylia), and Isparta Museums for facilitating sample collection. All maps were plotted in R using the worldHiRes map of the ‘mapdata’ package (using data in the public domain from the CIA World Data Bank II). Research on Hagios Charalambos cave by P.J.P.McG. was supported by the Royal Society and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP). D.M.F. was supported by an Irish Research Council grant (GOIPG/2013/36). J.K. and A.M. were funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant KR 4015/1-1 and the Max Planck Society. D.R. was supported by National Institutes of Health grant GM100233, by National Science Foundation HOMINID BCS-1032255, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. The study of the ancient Minoans and Mycenaeans was supported by the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust to G.S.

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Editorial Summary

Genetic ancestry of Bronze Age Europeans

The most prominent civilizations that emerged during the Bronze Age in Europe include the Minoan culture on the island of Crete and the Mycenaean culture on mainland Greece, both in the Aegean region. Iosif Lazaridis, David Reich, Johannes Krause, George Stamatoyannopoulos and colleagues investigated the origins of these two archaeological cultures by analysing new genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans, Mycenaeans and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. While Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically very similar, with shared ancestry from the western Anatolian and Aegean regions, they were also distinct, with Mycenaeans showing additional ancestry related to the Bronze Age inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe.